Anyone who knows me knows I love horses. I have done so as far back as I can remember. I rode in pony club in Ireland, got my "B" rating, and was working on my H. Then life intervened and I ended up in the States, in college, working, in college again, and all that time I was poor and couldn't afford a horse. I catch rode -- rode whatever horse anyone would let me hop up on -- off-and-on during those years, and longed for my own.
Some time after I started teaching, I finally got my own, but riding even then was constricted because I had a new baby and was working full-time. Then there were a few blissful years where my daughter and I rode together, I on my precious TB/Connemara cross, Conner, and she on her darling Welsh pony, Christopher Robin. We did musical kurs together at dressage shows. She rode baby events, and I rode the slightly bigger courses with her older pony club friends. We were the Hairy Trotters, and we had fun.
Then came the Dark Ages of my life. I lost my best friend to cancer, and I got sick and sicker till I had to have my tonsils out (strep throat for six months straight is no fun, especially in America where the insurance companies can and will deny necessary surgery). A month later my mother got cancer, and then I got it too, and we had the fun of enduring treatment together -- including literally back-to-back mastectomies. And the following year I was hospitalized with Hep. A. because my immune system was shot, and the next year my parents' house was hit with an earthquake and should have been evacuated but my mother refused and they lived there without power, water, sewage in the winter for three weeks till services came back. And during that time my mother's cancer metastasized and she went into treatment again and then my dad had a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery and neither could drive and my poor sister was trying to finish her Masters' in entomology during this time and I was driving back and forth over the pass to help out and things just got harder and harder and harder. And then I developed asthma and couldn't breathe anymore, and so I had to let my darling horses go.
And that's the short version.
Anyway, 10 years later, my dear friend and former Hairy Trotter partner Kara Toye got me back into riding with a text on a cold wintry day right as I was walking in the door after a trip to D.C. with my dad: "Going to Paso Del Mundo. Come ride."
And I did. And the rest is history.
I rode her horse Blitz for three months till he sold as a trail horse. Then I rode "my" beloved Willow, a little Hungarian warmblood cross with a big heart and a sparkling intelligence. She wasn't really mine and I wasn't in a position to buy a horse, but she's been in my heart ever since. Then there was Cody, then Bailey, then Danny, then Coco and Butterscotch, then Al and Windy -- all of these my regular rides, horses who left their mark on me, all whom I hope will remember me fondly. And in between, some 30-odd other horses whom I rode once or twice or a handful of times.
And then came time for me to get my own, a time when I finally had a space at the boarding barn where I had been on a waiting list for two years -- a place aptly named "Horse Haven." And after much searching, after friends and I had driven sometimes across town and sometimes across the pass to see horse after horse, there was Lexi. Like Willow, she's a Hungarian warmblood, and that caught my attention. Unlike Willow, she had come back to her breeder after being at a barn where she was badly abused. She has quirks, which made her more affordable than she would have been otherwise. She needs someone who will give her time to recover, who will take it slowly, who will recognize her worries and give her time to think when she's anxious.
Yesterday I bridled her in the arena. She's headshy, and particularly terrified of any contact near her left ear. Following her breeder's instructions, I dropped the bit low on the bridle to give plenty of room for the headpiece, told her "head" as I put the reins over her head, then lifted the bridle, waited till she accepted the bit, and then gently moved to press her ear forward and below the headpiece. She grew anxious, raised her head high in the air, backed up with wild eyes. Slowly I talked her down, rubbed her and whispered to her, gently lifted the bridle again. Again she backed, scared, flashing back to some terrifying experience of pain and betrayal. Slowly I worked her down again. A few minutes of dancing and her bridle was on, and then suddenly, unexpectedly she turned her head around and hugged me, her nose buried in my chest, me between her head and her shoulder, cradled there. She held me there for a few moments, breathing softly, her eyes dark and shining and soft, and then let go. And I realized there were tears on my face because that little "click" I'd felt the first day I met her had become something deep and powerful -- the first steps towards a partnership that I hope will last for years.
Horses can communicate if we listen. I've not always listened, not because of lack of wanting to hear, but because my own fears or frustrations got in the way of me paying attention. I know there will be times my lack of facility with Equinan (or is it Equinish?) will get in my way and I'll misunderstand her and she'll misunderstand me, but I hope there will be few of those times, and that I can remember the hug she gave me when I honored her fear and let her take her time to trust me.
In gratitude to horse hugs.
:)
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